Price Guides August 2003 Part II: Hard Drives and Memory
by Kristopher Kubicki on September 2, 2003 3:46 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Welcome back to another new edition of the AnandTech Price Guides. In order to stay a little bit ahead of the competition, we will also start to include storage products in our price guides. We had to work some AT Staff and an intern into the ground to make sure we had IDE and Serial ATA products added for this week’s edition! Remember, the tables below are embedded in Real Time, so even though we might publish on Monday, the information is current for the week.
Serial ATA hit the mass markets about a year ago, and since then it has been an uphill struggle for the hard drive companies. Maxtor and Western Digital have done an excellent job over the last 12 months to bring large quantity SATA storage down to near-IDE prices, with the serial ATA premium running about 10-15%. (Compare this to last year when SATA drives were more than double the cost of ATA133 counterparts).
As expected, the 7200RPM drives do not perform nearly as well as their SCSI equivalents, but they do outperform ATA133 drives and carry the added advantages of the Serial ATA bus. Below is a RealTime plot of our monitored SATA products.
The Maxtor and Seagate 120GB drives both perform excellent for the cost, which is less than a dollar a gigabyte. We slightly prefer the Seagate drive over the Maxtor, but this is due to customer service and satisfaction. Thus, we have to choose the Seagate 120GB our pick of the week.
Edit: Just as we stated several months ago the Western Digital Raptor 36.7GB 10,000RPM drive performs extremely well, but with several disadvantages (Don't forget to look at the Raptor preview as well). The high pitched whine and high cost do not seem to justify the performance increases for single user applications. Remember, virtually all SATA drives come with an 8MB cache which provides an incredible boost in performance for single user applications. Disk read speed is typically slightly lower than 2MB caches, but actually IO/sec can increase as much as 25%.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
13 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 1, 2003 - link
i have always like IBM hard drives now that i am ready to got to Serial ATA 80GB or higher i would like to request information on which Serial ATA is the best. Based on price, warranty, heat build up, speed, and anything else i left out. Thank you very much and keep up the great work. Your web site is one of the best i have found.KristopherKubicki - Saturday, September 6, 2003 - link
Its all fixed now. We have had a few errors while adding the "Change" column into the guides. It basically just displays the price delta over 7 days time. We are all done with any coding so it should all be ok.Kristopher
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
THIS IS SOOOO COOL!EVERYTHING IS FREE. I better post in hot deals really fast.
I don't know what to get first, the free 300 GB drive, or all the free ram I could hope for.
But no, really, there are some serious problems with the price engine.
KristopherKubicki - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
OK much better. Pretty soon the guides will start displaying week changing price as well ;) Should be neat.Thanks for the partience.
Kristopher
Dilsnik - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Still can't see any charts.8:30 PM Thursday Sept 4 2003
KristopherKubicki - Thursday, September 4, 2003 - link
Ah, its a problem on our side. Im fixing it. ;) We are trying to make it display weekly price changes as well. Give me an hour or so ;)Kristopher
BurninUp - Wednesday, September 3, 2003 - link
Why can't I see any charts? Darn XP and java I bet. Where can I get a Java plug in for stinkin XP pro?KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, September 3, 2003 - link
fixed.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 3, 2003 - link
The "check prices" link for the Raptor drive links to the wrong drive.KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, September 2, 2003 - link
My apologies. My data was based on the Raptor preview rather than the actual review. I have updated the data. Thanks for helping me out SUOrangeman and Jeff.SCSI drives should be added later this week.
Cheers,
Kristopher